Internap brought SSD into play in cloud computing/block storage realm. The pricing is also of my interest - how much they will charge for IaaS built of top of SolidFire? Will it be more expensive compared to the existing cloud service/storage offerings? As a customer I am willing to know how much I need to pay for a new service.

Both the short term, ephemeral storage and the longer term, block storage are based on SSDs, Ephemeral storage is what's assigned to your virtual machine, disappears when the VM does. Seems to me SSDs are an ideal scale-out device for the cloud.

I think it is safe to say that sold-state devices are inherently more reliable than electro-mechanical devices. I look forward to the day when electro-mechanical storage devices become historical curiosities just as vacuum tubes are. Whatever the startup issues are now, Internap and DigitalOcean will be repaid with a far more reliable hardware base in the near future. Byte for byte, digital is still more expensive, but the cost for solid state devices comes down much faster than the cost for electro-mechanical devices, so that disadvantage won't last for long.

Stay tuned on pricing. None was cited in announcement. A search of the Internap AgileCloud site resulted in directions to contact a sales representative, which I've declined to do. Amazon Web Services and other vendors just post their prices. To me, this means Internap hsa a price differential that it doesn't wish to publicly air. I will try to get some sort of pricing on the record.

Charlie, how does the cost for this storage from Internap compare with buying Amazon EBS? Assuming it's more expensive, do you think SSD will deliver a performance improvement that makes it worthwhile?

As InformationWeek Government readers were busy firming up their fiscal year 2015 budgets, we asked them to rate more than 30 IT initiatives in terms of importance and current leadership focus. No surprise, among more than 30 options, security is No. 1. After that, things get less predictable.